1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the field of wood working and routering. More specifically, it discloses an apparatus for assisting in the manipulation of a workpiece so that it may be routered, cut, sanded, pin routered, or free routered.
A router is a rather bulky piece of equipment requiring careful manipulation so that a workpiece is not ruined by a wrong cut. Furthermore, without a means of guiding a router or like piece of equipment, it is difficult if not impossible to achieve many desired goals in the finished product.
2. Description of Relevant Art
Heretofore guides have been proposed and disclosed for directing the operations of routering, milling, cutting, sanding, free routering, and pin routering. One such unit which assists in the task of routering was disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,044,805 in which a new and improved router guide fence and associated sub-base were shown, and said fence had a straight edge of considerable length interrupted by a recess of about the same size as the largest router bit to be used. This fence, however, has the disadvantage of being able to do only one job, that being routering, and does not lend itself to easily planing a straight edge as, e.g., a piece of wood being worked as it would pass by the recess for the router bit would have different dimensions on one side of the router bit than the other after having been routed.
There have also been disclosed devices for holding a workpiece while it is being routed or worked with other similar equipment. One such device was disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,480,364 which showed an apparatus for holding a workpiece having alignment pins in an aligned position on a work table. This device, however, has the disadvantage of not being combined with, for example, a router fence, a zeroing gauge, and/or a miter. All of which are useful to have in close proximity to a workpiece.
Applicant's apparatus seeks to provide not only a workpiece holding alignment device, and a new and improved router fence, but also a work area having a true guide router fence attached to said work area and said apparatus will be adaptable to four or five different distinct operations. Additionally, said apparatus will have removable attachments allowing it to be used for different types of jobs, for example, pin routering, routering, cutting, sanding, and free form routering.